In which I wax poetic about Ravelry…

So, for those of you who knit, crochet, or do any form of fiber arts and do not have a Ravelry account, you seriously need to rectify that. Ravelry is kind of like Facebook for fiber people, except even better. It’s free to join, but you need an account to browse. Reasons I love it:

Hundreds and thousands of free patterns and over 1 million users

Ability to publish and sell your own patterns

You can look up other people’s project notes on a pattern you want to start and save yourself a lot of headaches

You can search for project ideas based on the yarn you have – say you bought a really pretty skein without a project in mind – you can search by the weight of the yarn, the yardage, the type of project you want to make, etc. and come up with the perfect use for it.

It’s great for organizing your projects – you can post pictures, put in your notes, which needles you used, the pattern name, how long it took, etc.

The library feature is great – you can enter the books you own and then browse pictures of people’s finished objects using those patterns – plus get errata and tips – plus store PDFs of patterns you’ve downloaded and purchased

Forums and groups are really fun and there’s tons of useful information

Want to see how that crazy colored variegated yarn will actually look once it’s knit/crocheted up? You can search all the projects made with that yarn and narrow it down by colorway.

You can view everything your friends are working on, what yarn they’ve purchased, completed projects, others’ projects they’ve “favorited”, and more in your “Friend Activity Feed”.

People have yarn for sale or trade on there and some of them are pretty awesome deals.

There’s a whole section where you can browse people’s failed projects (“Ughs”) if you’re feeling kind of bitchy and want to see some ugly creations…

If you’re an organization lover like me, you’ll love being able to digitally manage your stash of yarn, which patterns you have, your queue of items you want to make, and tag and organize all of the projects you’ve finished.

If you’re a designer the site tools are pretty cool – you can upload your PDFs for people to download, track your statistics (number of downloads, number of people who’ve made your patterns, sales stats, etc.).

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 17th, 2011 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Jabber, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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